KVR Audio

Guillaume Piolat · Post by **Guillaume Piolat** » Thu Aug 16, 2018 6:09 pm

Today Auburn Sounds (maker of Graillon and Panagement) introduces COUTURE (AAX / AU / VST2).

COUTURE brings you absurdly easy transient control and saturation in a fancy package, with pristine sound behaviour, and even some innovation in some places. Bear with me.

Our grand vision is that Transient Control could be somehow satisfying. To make a visual analogy, COUTURE is to your mix what a Depth of Field effect is to a photo.

What COUTURE can do:

Dynamic expansion, make individual drum tracks a lot more dynamic and punchy
Dynamic compression, eg: remove the "click" out of a kick drum sample
Give glue (or undo glue, you get the idea) to a mix with light compression. Lift 1 or 2 dB here, control room, or increase body with the all-powerful Sharpen parameter.
Use a subtle saturation that preserve dynamics. Beware this is new, Couture is completely volume-independent. You can distort without changing dynamics. No gain-staging constraints that could backfire later in the mixing stage.
Deess the very start of notes for vocals. Actually the detector has 3 settings, one of the most interesting is probably "human" which makes it feel volume like we do.
Give life to inane lead synths with 6 saturation types. Those are dynamic waveshapers. Having both Saturation and Transient Shaping next to each other is an invitation to make decisions about them at the same time. We think that it leads to decidedly different results.

This plug-in has internal lookahead rather than favouring too much min-phase. Its design leans towards the gain curve sitting at the top of the transient: it does that thanks to a painfully researched RMS, half-spectral, 2-band, 100% program-dependent envelope follower (but operation itself is 1-band).

COUTURE provides Front/Back and Speed instead of Attack and Release. It is mostly the same thing in fractional form, but with a twist.

Setting Front/Back on "Front" settings matches the behaviour of an Attack knob in your regular Transient Shaper.
Setting Front/Back on "Back" settings matches the behaviour of a Sustain knob.

So you get access to any behaviour "in-between", if that makes sense. To be well understood this pair of parameters is better used on a snare drum track (though the plug-in itself works on almost anything).

Availability
COUTURE is available as AAX / VST / Audio Unit for macOS and Windows, 32-bit and 64-bit (AAX only 64-bit).

Free Edition
Like all our plug-ins this is a freemium and can be used in its Free Edition without any time-limit (but without the Saturation module).

However we survive thanks to your support when you buy the FULL version. So, if you like what we do, please consider upgrading to the real experience ; it is nothing like its half.

Thankfully there is an Intro Price: Until September 16th 2018, COUTURE is only 39€ instead of 49€.

>>> Get it here at https://www.auburnsounds.com/products/Couture.html <<< before we run out of stock

More information
Blog Post: https://www.auburnsounds.com/blog/2018- ... uture.html
Youtube Trailer:

Eauson · Post by **Eauson** » Thu Aug 16, 2018 6:33 pm

This looks super, will check out your freemium product, if its anything like your Panagement product, as In quality, then its all

Russell Grand · Post by **Russell Grand** » Thu Aug 16, 2018 7:46 pm

Nice, Auburn! Looking forward to trying out the free version.

Guillaume Piolat · Post by **Guillaume Piolat** » Fri Aug 17, 2018 10:25 am

Eauson wrote:This looks super, will check out your freemium product, if its anything like your Panagement product, as In quality, then its all

Our newer products surely beat Panagement currently

Be sure to check this one out, the worst outcome is that you get a free Transient Shaper.
If you get the Full Edition it's much more transformative.

Halonmusic · Post by **Halonmusic** » Sun Aug 19, 2018 3:27 pm

Cool! Gonna check this out

Liero · Post by **Liero** » Sun Aug 19, 2018 5:34 pm

Auburn Sounds is slowly becoming the Sonic Charge of the plugin world (since SC seem to be interested in hardware these days) - very out-of-the-box, very innovative, highly recommended!

I'm all over this, plus I've been using Graillon on all sorts of sources. Thanks for these!

Guillaume Piolat · Post by **Guillaume Piolat** » Tue Sep 11, 2018 4:00 pm

Couture 1.1 Release Notes:
• Add Pro Tools bypass support
• Add compatibility with Open Broadcast Studio
• Fix crash in Cubase (and possibly other hosts) triggered when reopening the UI. This one was a pretty severe one.

You can find new downloads at => Auburn Sounds - Couture, level independent dynamics

If you are already a customer => Auburn Sounds - I'm a customer. How to download the latest plug-ins?

laggy · Post by **laggy** » Tue Sep 11, 2018 4:42 pm

I tried the free version and it is amazing. It is definitely different from the typical transient shaper in terms of what it can do. I tried it on the master bus of a few tracks and it can achieve some of (maybe all) of what Zynaptiq Unmix:drums can in terms of emphasizing/de-emphasizing drums in a full mix. Magic!

Caine123 · Post by **Caine123** » Tue Sep 11, 2018 6:11 pm

downloading the free version atm, anybody compared to SPL Transient designer etc?

Caine123 · Post by **Caine123** » Tue Sep 11, 2018 7:10 pm

ok i wonder why it sounds VERY different, just using the attack.

SPL Transient Designer ATTACK MAX
https://clyp.it/ozsp0221

Couture ATTACK MAX
https://clyp.it/nub52q1m

what i like (only free version, no saturation testable sadly), that you can adjustbass too. nice, seems unique

oh i forgot.

1. no BYPASS button?
2. GUI Size changeable?

Guillaume Piolat · Post by **Guillaume Piolat** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 9:19 am

Caine123 wrote: ok i wonder why it sounds VERY different, just using the attack.

The control scheme is different:
- when Front/Back is turned to Front, the Sharpen knobs acts a bit like the Attack knob on a regular transient shaper.
- when Front/Back is turned to Back, the Sharpen knobs acts a bit like the Sustain knob on a regular transient shaper.
So you get access to behaviour in-between.

A lot of things are different in Couture.

One of the overarching design decision is that the gain applied to the signal is always centered on the positions of higher energy. Hence why it's RMS and will stays that way. Unlike with attack/release settings you don't have to fiddle so much: it's GR effect is (hopefully) where it makes sense semantically. The detector is 100% program-dependent for this particular purpose.

1. no BYPASS button?
2. GUI Size changeable?

We just don't have this at the moment. The hope was that you would use your host bypass (should be possible in Pro Tools since Couture v1.1).

sqigls · Post by **sqigls** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 11:38 am

a new brush

thank you so much!

SoundPorn · Post by **SoundPorn** » Wed Sep 12, 2018 6:02 pm

Best transient shaper I've ever used. The ability to accent the attack or decay is brilliant and so is the way it handles gain. And every single DAW has a bypass button that's usually more trustworthy too so plugins don't really need them at all.

Jonathan Shepherd · Post by **Jonathan Shepherd** » Mon Jan 03, 2022 6:40 pm

Sorry to be the resurrector here but I wanted to say this is my favorite transient shaper too. The sound just works. Never seems like it's taking over the sound, or being too unnaturally aggressive like other shapers. Organic is the word I guess. And the saturation works great without blunting the sound. I hadn't checked for any updates on Itch.io in a while, but what do you know it's up to version 1.6. Great stuff here. I might have to get Panagement soon!

Halonmusic · Post by **Halonmusic** » Tue Jan 04, 2022 1:52 am

its great indeed

Auburn Sounds introduces Couture [Transient Shaper / Saturation]